IBM Rational ClearCase and IBM Rational ClearQuest Evaluation Guide, Part 1: Unified Change Management

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Unified Change Management: Project integrator role

At this point, you need to test the new change and create a new baseline that includes any newly delivered activities. UCM baselines are meant to represent stable configurations in your software projects. After reporting that testing has been completed, you will want to identify or label this release to ensure that you can reproduce this checkpoint at any time. Other work such as manufacturing, product support and new product development activities can then start with this new baseline.

You may be familiar with a software development organization where there is one well-identified product with multiple releases already supported, and new releases every six months. Now, imagine yourself in an Information Technology environment. Managing technology is a moving target. You and your team may produce many mission-critical custom products, often with no more than one release at a time. In either scenario, project management and managing software assets are critical to any project's success.

Rational ClearCase and Rational ClearQuest work together to keep the team focused and informed and to keep project progress moving efficiently.

Moving from the Developer environment, you'll change hats and login to Rational ClearQuest as the project integrator. For this demonstration, the project integrator has the combined roles of Quality Engineer and Release or Integration Engineer.

After the development work is completed, the change request proceeds to Quality Engineering to verify the change implemented and to begin testing. You, the Quality Engineer, will look up the appropriate tasks from the ClearQuest native client.

In this section you will learn how to:

• Create a baseline from the latest delivered activities
• Review, test and validate the latest changes to the activity
• Create and promote a new baseline based on your results

In this exercise the Integration Engineer will login to Rational ClearQuest as username dana.

1. Open the ClearQuest perspective.
2. Click on the connection icon and select Manage Connections.

3. Highlight the CQ_Trial connection and click Add Connection, and click Next.

4. In the Additional Connection Information dalog, under Used ID, enter dana and click Finish.
5. In the Connect dalog, under Password, enter dana as then and click OK.

6. Click Close on the ClearQuest Connection Management window. (Figure 43)

Now it's time to create your query:

1. Click on the ClearQuest menu and select New > Query.
2. Use the New Query Wizard to build a query that searches on Defects in the Resolved state. Name the query Resolved Defects. Be sure to select Run Query when finished.

Refer to Steps 4 - 9 in the previous section entitled "Log on and run a query" for a reminder on how to create a query in Rational ClearQuest. This time however, you will need to include the State field and you will filter on the value Resolved.

3. Open defect CLSIC00000058, Fix error in readme.html from the query results pane.

4. Under ClearQuest Record Details, select the Unified Change Management tab.

5. Click the View Change Set button.
6. Expand the Name column on the Change Set tab to confirm the file name of the file, right-click Readme.html and select Compare with Change Set Predecessor from the pop-up menu.

7. Click the Next Difference button (arrow) on the toolbar until you have viewed all of the changes to the file, and click File > Exit.

8. Close the Change Set properties window.
9. In the ClearQuest Record Details window, click the Audit Trail tab for defect CLSIC00000058 and scroll to the bottom to review what has happened to this defect thus far.

If this were an actual release cycle, you would run through in-depth testing and manage that process. Rational ClearQuest software manages the full range of testing activities from test planning, to test execution, to the capture and analysis of test results. Test plans can be defined. Test cases can be created and associated with specific test plans.

In this case, we will do a simple desk check for validation of the defect. To do this we will review the code changes implemented to fix this defect. It is very easy to review the changes directly from the change set information that has been collected with the defect report. By right-clicking on any of the files in the change set, you can execute many common operations, like looking at the history of the file or comparing the changed version with a predecessor. In this case, you choose to compare the new version of the source file with the version that existed before you started the change. You see that the proper change has been made.

Having confirmed that the proper fix has been you completed, you need to change the defect report to indicate that the fix has been validated. To do this, you execute the Validate action against that defect report. Once the action has been completed, the defect report is transitioned to the Closed state, and the defect is now considered fixed.

10. Select Validate from the Actions menu.

11. The Validate action requires that you sign the record before proceeding. Click on the eSignature tab, and under Enter eSignature here, and enter dana/dana for username/password, and click Apply.

12. The defect record is now closed and validated, logout out of ClearQuest.

You have now completed the lifecycle for a change request through various roles, from assigning by the project lead, through opening and resolving by the developer and validating by the tester.

Creating a new baseline

You are now ready to incorporate the latest delivered changes into a new baseline. You go to the Rational ClearCase Metadata Explorer and navigate to the CLSICS_CD project. You see that there are several streams, including the project's Integration stream. To create a baseline with the latest activities, right-click over the Integration stream (CLSICS_CD_Int) and select Make Baseline.

You have the option to create either an incremental or full baseline. The incremental baseline is more efficient because it tags only the objects that have changed since the last full baseline. For this exercise, we will create an incremental baseline.

You also have the option of accepting a default name or specifying a name for the baseline. We'll change the name of this baseline to something that's a bit easier to remember.

1. Navigate to the ClearCase perspective.
2. From the Window menu, go to Show View then select ClearCase Metadata Navigator.

3. Navigate to the CLSICS_CD project under the CLSICS_pvob, then select the CLSICS_CD_Int stream.

4. Right-click the CLSICS_CD_Int integration stream and select Make Baseline.

5. Type in QA_Rel_15 as the name of the new baseline. Click OK.

6. Click OK in the Baselines Successfully Created dialog box to acknowledge creation of new baseline.

Once the new baseline has been created, you can look at the properties for this baseline. One of the properties tracked for each baseline is the Promotion Level. The Promotion Level gives you a way to track the current state or quality level of that baseline's version of your application.

When you have been able to successfully build the version of the application identified by this baseline, you change the promotion level to Built, as follows.

1. Right-click on the stream and select Properties.
2. Click on the Baselines tab and under Components, select the component (VOB) CLSICS_comp1.
3. Under Baselines, select QA_Rel_15 and click Properties.

4. On the General tab in the baseline properties window, click the pull-down menu under Promotion level, set the promotion level to BUILT, and click OK.
5. Close the Stream properties window.

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